Ursula Pflug - Seeds and Other Stories

“How do we get her out?” Siena asked the gathered teenagers. “So she can be loved too and not just always create it in other’s people’s lives?”

“By teaching her to love herself, like you did for us,” Liz said.

“I didn’t know that’s what I did,” Siena said.

KAREN. I’VE BARELY DARED think of her, thought today of the skirt I gave her years ago. I suddenly realized it was a going away present. A goodbye present: I only saw her once more after that. But which of us was going away?

And now I can’t not think of her, back on Salt Spring after ten years, in this little cabin where we stayed—a sleeping loft, a little cook stove, and, amazingly, the same even more faded blue print curtain on the window.

Karen’s son was named Moon. What was Moon’s father called? I feel I could retrieve his name, if it was important enough. But it’s not.

Homes. What are they made of? After squatting in this cabin and others, working and camping all over British Columbia for years alone, I met Karen and Moon. We hit it off and in the end they lived with me here for almost a year, and then we forged a life plan together. We’d work, buy land, make a family of ourselves. I thought Toronto, my home town, and not Vancouver or Victoria. We didn’t even tell Moon’s father—Karen had stopped forwarding their address or lack of it after what happened the last time he took his son for a weekend. Finding the child uncontrollable, he’d returned Moon to Karen’s doorstep at midnight, not even staying to make sure she was home.

We had little money and hitchhiked, the three of us, with backpacks and rolled tents. It was September. Moon was nine, I was twenty, Karen was twenty-nine. Moon thought it high adventure to sleep in ditches when we weren’t let off near a campground at night; to coax a flame from damp kindling; to strike the tent himself some mornings; to eat beans and scrambled eggs cooked in a pan over a fire. I remember Karen even offered to demonstrate how to skin and cook a roadkill porcupine. “Gross,” Moon told me, “but quite edible with onions.”

“Must you?” I declined. Now I think it a shame I didn’t take the chance to learn this extra life skill.

Enzo had woken from a dream in which their daughter Katie’s fort had red gaillardias woven through the dishevelled pile of kids’ sleeping bags, signifying, he knew even in the dream, limitless joy. Ending in a disastrous mood as often as not, but still, he’d had such a great time with Katie and her friends, had been even somewhat lax about nutritious meals and bedtime and teeth brushing but perhaps that was the point. If one stopped obsessing over propriety for a sweet short moment sometimes lasting an entire weekend about their hair their baths their laundry their three square, they let you into their incredible secret, more: would teach you how to participate in infinite joy.

But the next morning, their daughter’s amusing nine-year-old friends gone home, Enzo worried again. Right at this moment Azalea might be kayaking in the cold and wet. He was surprised to find no anger in himself at her leaving, ditching him with the kid. He just wanted her home safe. Badly.

I remember Karen and I walking in the railway lands at the foot of Bathurst Street, a break from job-and-apartment hunting. We came upon an empty old boxcar and found a plastic bag of toiletries and other small items, a sleeping bag, a comic lying open beside it. “Let’s sit and read the comic,” I said, completely charmed.

Karen replied, “It’s their home; it would be rude to go in without being invited,” and I was humbled, feeling as always she saw more than me. I so desperately wanted to wear that home as my own, just for a few minutes. I would trespass for the sake of my fantasy, not even seeing how fragile this tiny home was, how doubly important to respect its ephemeral boundaries.

Living in a city again I needed to work so I could pay for rent and food; knew already how hard it would be to save a down payment, not spend it in bars and restaurants, on clothes, anything to wash the feel of eight hours of shift work away. On Salt Spring we’d been able to live rent free in our borrowed cabin, eat off the land, at least to an extent. I loved it. It was Karen who grumbled. She already had a child, even then almost ten years old. He’d be a young adult now. For how long was I oblivious, as she hardened herself against the disapproving gaze?

The cabin is on Crown Land. My old friend Elm pays a pittance for his lease. “What is public land for if people can’t make homes on it,” Karen used to say, and with what fervent desire I wanted her to be right.

Why didn’t Azalea write or call? It had been more than a week. Enzo read her computer journal, for herself alone. He began at the beginning. Azalea wrote, five years before:

I bought Karen a skirt. I don’t know why. We’ve never felt the need to make showy gifts to one another. We had such dreams, Karen and I. I remember how, after we came east, two months into city life I hated walls already. I missed tents badly; just enough of a roof to keep the rain off. Karen and I worked in clubs at night, and soon all the peace of the forest had gone to noise. But not quite all; so often as I hustled tables, I was kayaking along a forested coast in my mind, watching for whales.

And now Enzo and I have a house full of appliances. Why? So that our daughter won’t grow up to be like Karen. We live as if we believed machines could protect us. Yet Karen grew up surrounded by appliances too, and they didn’t protect her. Even more than Karen, I wonder what Moon’s doing now.

Before it came back to him Enzo briefly wondered who Karen was. He wondered who his own friends were. Scrolling through pages he saw that Azalea wrote about Karen more than she wrote about him—he could think of no one who took up as much space in his life. Except, of course, for her. Azalea herself.

Who were his friends? His mother, his daughter. Azalea, Enzo had thought, but now he wasn’t so sure. Did friends walk away from one another? Was that sometimes a necessary part of friendship? And the question begged asking: abandon one another to what?

And which of them had abandoned the other?

There were old friends from high school and university he talked to once or twice a year. They seemed so far away from his life now, a distance too large to be breached. They wouldn’t be able to offer comfort if he called, because he wouldn’t tell. Tell them what?

Azalea’s gone.

And Karen? She was a single mother, a few years older than Azalea. The two women had travelled the west coast before they came to Ontario, where Azalea met Enzo, did the married thing. Went back to school. They had a child.

But what happened to Karen? And what happened to Azalea, to make her leave?

I phoned Enzo to tell him I’m not coming home yet, to dependably shop for school clothes, set the alarm, pack lunches for the big day. He didn’t tell me I was cruel or neglectful, just told me Katie was fine and asked me when I’d come. Not sure, I said. I felt selfish, yet what about his cruelty? How impassively he sat by while I lost myself in years of laundry and cooking and scrubbed floors and isolation, so often alone with the child. The baby drove me crazy in love and towards desperation in equal measures. I wrote papers for school in the wee hours and broke into occasional sobs of exhaustion Enzo found unaccountable.

I suppose I’m having a bit of a nervous breakdown, leaving as I so suddenly did but without crying jags, temper tantrums, or an inability to get out of bed. This time I just bought a plane ticket instead, without warning Enzo. Looking for some peace, wanting to be alone. And now I am alone, yet not feeling isolated at all. Funny, that.